Mehdi Hasanhttp://www.newstatesman.com/taxonomy/term/7729/all
enMehdi Hasan: Five questions that trouble Ed Miliband’s many disillusioned supportershttp://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/02/mehdi-hasan-five-questions-trouble-ed-miliband-s-many-disillusioned-supporters
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The questions the Labour leader can’t answer.</p>
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<em>Photo: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images</em></p>
<p>
Forget the New Labour icons Tony Blair and Alan Milburn. Ignore the business bosses Stuart Rose and Stefano Pessina. If Ed Miliband isn’t prime minister after the general election in May, he has only one person to blame: himself.</p>
<p>
The Labour leader, contrary to the lazy conventional wisdom, has the potential to be a good, even great, premier. He has, his friends say, a “Thatcher-esque” ambition to transform the British political and economic scene and has proved to be one of the most influential leaders of the opposition in living memory, forcing issues such as phone-hacking, the cost of living and Palestinian statehood on to the political agenda. If he wins on 7 May, he will walk through the door of No 10 with more high-level government experience – as a former cabinet minister and an ex-Treasury adviser – than Tony Blair and David Cameron combined when they entered Downing Street.</p>
<p>
Yet it isn’t just his opponents who question whether Miliband will become prime minister. A growing number of his supporters do, too. Such is the right-wing reflex of much of our press that the only critique of the Labour leader which gets a hearing these days comes from either business bosses or Blairite ultras. There are, however, many centre-left MPs, peers and activists who backed Miliband’s insurgent leadership candidacy in the summer of 2010 but who now have their own issues with the Labour leader and his failures. They gather in the pubs and tearooms of Westminster to moan and groan about their man, more in sorrow than in anger.</p>
<p>
Consider the following five questions that disillusioned “Ed-ites” often obsess over – and that Miliband has yet to address, in public or in private. First, why has a former television researcher – yes, Miliband worked briefly on Channel 4’s <em>A Week in Politics</em> in the early 1990s – failed to recognise how abjectly awful his performances on TV have been since 2010? Why hasn’t he taken urgent steps to improve them? In 2011 David Cameron hired Craig Oliver, a former editor of the BBC’s <em>News at Ten</em>, to be his director of communications. Miliband preferred to appoint three veteran lobby correspondents with zero experience in television, waiting until as late as September 2014 to recruit Matthew Laza, a former producer for the BBC of <em>The One Show</em>, to serve as his head of broadcasting.</p>
<p>
Second, how did this son of Holocaust survivors allow his family’s compelling story to be ignored so easily, despite high-profile attacks from the <em>Daily Mail</em> and the pro-Israeli actress Maureen Lipman (who announced that she would be abandoning Labour until it was “led by <em>mensches</em>” – the Yiddish word for people of integrity)? How many are aware that Miliband publicly challenged a Sudanese diplomat over his “disgusting” comparison of efforts to fight climate change with the Holocaust in 2009? A video of him receiving a standing ovation from UN delegates sits unwatched on an obscure BBC News web page and unused by Labour Party spinners. (Google “‘Don’t wreck conference’ pleas Miliband [<em>sic</em>]” if you have three minutes to spare.)</p>
<p>
Third, why is a former climate-change secretary who launched a “clean coal” policy, who debated against the climate sceptic Nigel Lawson and helped – in the words of the science writer Fred Pearce – “save” the Copenhagen summit in 2009 shedding voters to a resurgent Green Party? Forget “Red Ed”; whatever happened to “Green Ed”?</p>
<p>
Fourth, why isn’t Miliband – whom the <em>Daily Telegraph</em> described in 2009 as one of the “saints” of the parliamentary expenses scandal – leading the assault on our sclerotic political establishment? Why has he ceded this fertile terrain to a former City trader named Nigel Farage, who once boasted he’d claimed up to £2m in expenses and allowances from the European Parliament?</p>
<p>
Fifth, why has one of today’s few front-line Labour politicians who opposed the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq kept so quiet about his anti-war record? Why hasn’t he led the charge against the inexcusable delay in the publication of the Chilcot report? Labour is haemorrhaging voters to a range of anti-Iraq-war parties, from the Greens and the SNP to the Lib Dems. And yet, speaking at Prime Minister’s Questions on 21 January, Miliband remarked, almost as an aside, “Frankly, my views on the Iraq war are well known.” Sorry, Ed, they aren’t.</p>
<p>
The public doesn’t have a clue that in early 2003 he phoned Gordon Brown – as I revealed on these pages in 2010 – from the US, where he was on a sabbatical at Harvard, to urge the then chancellor to resist Tony Blair’s march to war. (A former Downing Street aide told me how Brown “took Ed’s phone call very seriously but, ultimately, other views prevailed”.)</p>
<p>
Yet on Iraq, as on MPs’ expenses, Miliband has taken a vow of silence. Why? To avoid, I’m told, embarrassing or provoking front-bench colleagues who did abuse their expenses and did cheerlead for the war in Iraq – despite Labour’s private polling showing how Miliband’s record on these issues is of huge appeal to floating voters. “The price of unity has been radicalism,” a friend of the Labour leader says. Another one told me that he “has to stop rewarding bad behaviour . . . He accommodates too much to others and isn’t forceful enough.”</p>
<p>
Miliband is said privately to declaim that he is “strategically bold but tactically cautious”. The inescapable problem for this wannabe prime minister is that, day after day, caution wins out. The Labour leader cannot afford to be his own worst enemy, as he approaches the closest general election in a generation. Cravenness doesn’t win political battles. Courage does.</p>
<p>
<em>Mehdi Hasan is a contributing writer for the NS and the political director of the Huffington Post UK, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/ed-miliband-2015-election_b_6668658.html?1423745518&amp;ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000067">where this column is crossposted</a></em></p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 12 Feb 2015 12:55:08 +0000Mehdi Hasan222381 at http://www.newstatesman.comDon’t let the ridiculous smears fool you: Syriza is no party of the radical “far left”http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/01/don-t-let-ridiculous-smears-fool-you-syriza-no-party-radical-far-left
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Opposing the logic of neoliberal economics does not mean the Greeks have become Marxists.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2015/01/493819411.jpg?itok=bP0Q5gYe" width="510" height="348" alt="Syriza supporters wave flags at a 2014 rally. Photo: ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images" title="Syriza supporters wave flags at a 2014 rally. Photo: ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Syriza supporters wave flags at a 2014 rally. Photo: ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <div style="clear:both;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Political language, as George Orwell observed in 1946, is “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. Seven decades later, consider the way in which mildly progressive political leaders are depicted by their right-wing critics. In the US, Barack Obama, who has bragged about securing “the lowest level of domestic spending” since the 1950s, is condemned as a “socialist” by his Republican opponents. (If only.) In the UK, Ed Miliband, who supports a public-sector pay freeze and wants to slash child benefit, is dismissed as “Red Ed” in the right-wing press. (We wish.) In France, François Hollande, who has presided over the steepest spending cuts in that country in more than 40 years, is deemed to be “anti-austerity”. (Huh?)</span></div>
<p>
Then there is Greece, where Syriza’s Alexis Tsipras, a mild-mannered, tieless civil engineer, was sworn in as prime minister on 26 January. Judging by the hysterical tone of the press coverage, you could be forgiven for assuming that the love child of Karl Marx and Che Guevara had been elected to office in Athens. “Far-left firebrand races to victory”, read a headline in the <em>Times</em>. “Shock waves across Europe as the far left sweeps to power in Greece”, shrieked the <em>Daily Mail</em>.</p>
<p>
Syriza, we are told, by everyone from the <em>Mail</em> to the BBC and the <em>Guardian</em>, is a bunch of radicals, revolutionaries and extremists. It’s not centre left; it’s far left. In this bizarre inversion of reality, those who helped to inflict mass unemployment, widespread poverty and public-health emergencies – involving a succession of HIV, tuberculosis and malaria epidemics – on a once-developed western country are deemed to be the moderates and the centrists. Is any more evidence needed of how our political debate has become so skewed to the right?</p>
<p>
After all, what is “extreme” about providing free electricity and food stamps to 300,000 Greek families now living below the poverty line, as Syriza has pledged to do? What is “revolutionary” about wanting to negotiate a restructuring of ballooning, essentially unpayable debts? Especially after austerity measures demanded by the unelected “Troika” (the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund) led to Greece’s public debt climbing from 126 per cent of GDP in 2009 to over 170 per cent of GDP in 2014. Is it “radical” to describe – as Tsipras has done – five years of relentless, growth-choking austerity, in which the suicide rate rose by 43 per cent, as a period of “humiliation and suffering”? Or to refer to Troika-enforced spending cuts – as Syriza’s Yanis Varoufakis, the new Greek finance minister, did – as a form of “fiscal waterboarding”?</p>
<p>
Don’t be distracted by the “far left” smear. Syriza’s programme of debt relief, fiscal stimulus and financial support for the poorest, rather than the richest, is mainstream macroeconomics. The party is merely planning to do what the textbooks suggest.</p>
<p>
Don’t take my word for it. On 23 January, two days before the Greek elections, 18 eminent economists, including the Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Christopher Pissarides, the Oxford University professor Simon Wren-Lewis and the former Bank of England interest-rate setter Charles Goodhart, published a joint letter to the <em>Financial Times</em> endorsing Syriza’s call for debt forgiveness. Economic stability in Greece, they argued, could be “achieved through growth and increased efficiency in tax collection rather than through public expenditure cuts, which have reduced the revenue base and led to an increase in the debt ratio”.</p>
<p>
Stiglitz and the others also called for a “further conditional increase in the grace period, so that Greece does not have to service any debt, for example for the next five years and then only if Greece is growing at 3 per cent or more”. They cited the precedent of the “bisque” clause of the 1946 Anglo-American financial agreement, under which the UK was allowed a waiver of 2 per cent interest payment until its economy “met agreed conditions”. As the 18 economists concluded, “the whole of Europe will benefit from Greece being given the chance of a fresh start”.</p>
<p>
Remember, the Greeks have not suddenly embraced Marxism. But they have revolted against the insanity of neoliberal economics – and against the extremists in Brussels and Berlin bent on imposing austerity on them. The only real “shock” is that it took so long for this Hellenic backlash against fiscal sadism to commence. On a visit to Athens in 2012, I met Nikitas Kanakis, the director of the Greek branch of the charity Doctors of the World. He described to me in graphic detail how his country was in the midst of a “humanitarian crisis”. “If the people cannot survive with dignity,” he said quietly, “we cannot have a future.”</p>
<p>
Will Syriza give them back their dignity? “Hope is here,” declared a victorious Tsipras on 25 January. But time is not on the party’s side and this movement of political novices will have to confront a vast array of vested interests at home and abroad – from the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the bean-counters of the Troika to the tax-dodging business elite of Athens and a Greek police force infiltrated by neo-Nazis. It won’t be easy and if Syriza fails, the swing back to the right will be both decisive and disastrous.</p>
<p>
A few days ago, I rang Kanakis to see if he was celebrating Syriza’s rise to power. He wasn’t. “What I’m afraid about,” he said, “is that sometimes hope creates illusions.”</p>
<p>
<em>Mehdi Hasan is a contributing writer for the NS and the political director of the Huffington Post UK, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/greece-elections-syriza_b_6570994.html?1422543706&amp;ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000067">where this column is crossposted</a> . His ebook “The Debt Delusion” is published by Vintage</em></p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 29 Jan 2015 15:34:41 +0000Mehdi Hasan221386 at http://www.newstatesman.comAs a Muslim, I’m fed up with the hypocrisy of the free speech fundamentalistshttp://www.newstatesman.com/mehdi-hasan/2015/01/muslim-i-m-fed-hypocrisy-free-speech-fundamentalists
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The response to the inexcusable murder of Charlie Hebdo’s staff has proved that many liberals are guilty of double standards when it comes to giving offence.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2015/01/461436464.jpg?itok=wlqJeJdR" width="510" height="348" alt="Protests in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo killings. Photo: Getty" title="Protests in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo killings. Photo: Getty" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Protests in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo killings. Photo: Getty</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>
<em><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Dear liberal pundit,</span></em></p>
<p>
You and I didn’t like George W Bush. Remember his puerile declaration after 9/11 that “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”? Yet now, in the wake of another horrific terrorist attack, you appear to have updated Dubbya’s slogan: either you are with free speech . . . or you are against it. Either <em>vous êtes Charlie Hebdo</em> . . . or you’re a freedom-hating fanatic.</p>
<p>
I’m writing to you to make a simple request: please stop. You think you’re defying the terrorists when, in reality, you’re playing into their bloodstained hands by dividing and demonising. Us and them. The enlightened and liberal west <em>v</em> the backward, barbaric Muslims. The massacre in Paris on 7 January was, you keep telling us, an attack on free speech. The conservative former French president Nicolas Sarkozy agrees, calling it “<a href="http://www.itv.com/news/update/2015-01-08/sarkozy-this-is-a-war-declared-on-civilisation/" target="_blank">a war declared on civilisation</a>”. So, too, does the liberal-left pin-up Jon Snow, who <a href="https://twitter.com/jonsnowc4/status/552804891920711680" target="_blank">crassly tweeted</a> about a “clash of civilisations” and referred to “Europe’s belief in freedom of expression”.</p>
<p>
In the midst of all the post-Paris grief, hypocrisy and hyperbole abounds. Yes, the attack was an act of unquantifiable evil; an inexcusable and merciless murder of innocents. But was it really a “<a href="http://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/bid-to-assassinate-freedom-has-utterly-failed-commentary-by-itvs-mark-austin-9964956.html" target="_blank">bid to assassinate</a>” free speech (ITV’s Mark Austin), to “desecrate” our ideas of “free thought” (<a href="http://www.stephenfry.com/2015/01/10/you-must-mock/" target="_blank">Stephen Fry</a>)? It was a crime – not an act of war – perpetrated by disaffected young men; radicalised not by drawings of the Prophet in Europe in 2006 or 2011, as it turns out, but by images of US torture in Iraq in 2004.</p>
<p>
Please get a grip. None of us believes in an untrammelled right to free speech. We all agree there are always going to be lines that, for the purposes of law and order, cannot be crossed; or for the purposes of taste and decency, <em>should </em>not be crossed. We differ only on where those lines should be drawn.</p>
<p>
Has your publication, for example, run cartoons mocking the Holocaust? No? How about caricatures of the 9/11 victims falling from the twin towers? I didn’t think so (and I am glad it hasn’t). Consider also the “thought experiment” offered by the Oxford philosopher <a href="http://mondoweiss.net/2015/01/moral-hysteria-charlie" target="_blank">Brian Klug</a>. Imagine, he writes, if a man had joined the “unity rally” in Paris on 11 January “wearing a badge that said ‘<em>Je suis Chérif</em>’” – the first name of one of the <em>Charlie Hebdo</em> gunmen. Suppose, Klug adds, he carried a placard with a cartoon mocking the murdered journalists. “How would the crowd have reacted? . . . Would they have seen this lone individual as a hero, standing up for liberty and freedom of speech? Or would they have been profoundly offended?” Do you disagree with Klug’s conclusion that the man “would have been lucky to get away with his life”?</p>
<p>
Let’s be clear: I agree there is no justification whatsoever for gunning down journalists or cartoonists. I disagree with your seeming view that the right to offend comes with no corresponding responsibility; and I do not believe that a right to offend automatically translates into a <em>duty</em> to offend.</p>
<p>
When you say “<em>Je suis Charlie</em>”, is that an endorsement of <em>Charlie Hebdo</em>’s depiction of the French justice minister, <a href="http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/625/media/images/80155000/png/_80155413_twittermaxblumenthal.png" target="_blank">Christiane Taubira</a>, who is black, drawn as a monkey? Of crude caricatures of bulbous-nosed Arabs that must make Edward Said turn in his grave?</p>
<p>
Lampooning racism by reproducing brazenly racist imagery is a pretty dubious satirical tactic. Also, as the former <em>Charlie Hebdo</em> journalist Olivier Cyran <a href="http://www.article11.info/?Charlie-Hebdo-pas-raciste-Si-vous" target="_blank">argued in 2013</a>, an “Islamophobic neurosis gradually took over” the magazine after 9/11, which then effectively endorsed attacks on "members of a minority religion with no influence in the corridors of power".</p>
<p>
It's for these reasons that I can't "be", don’t want to “be", Charlie – if anything, we should want to be Ahmed, the Muslim policeman who was killed while protecting the magazine’s right to exist. As the novelist Teju Cole has observed, “It is possible to defend the right to obscene . . . speech without promoting or sponsoring the content of that speech.”</p>
<p>
And why have you been so silent on the glaring double standards? Did you not know that <em>Charlie Hebdo</em> sacked the veteran French cartoonist <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/4351672/French-cartoonist-Sine-on-trial-on-charges-of-anti-Semitism-over-Sarkozy-jibe.html" target="_blank">Maurice Sinet</a> in 2008 for making an allegedly anti-Semitic remark? Were you not aware that <em>Jyllands-Posten</em>, the Danish newspaper that published caricatures of the Prophet in 2005, reportedly rejected cartoons mocking Christ because they would “provoke an outcry” and proudly declared it would “in no circumstances . . . publish Holocaust cartoons”?</p>
<p>
Muslims, I guess, are expected to have thicker skins than their Christian and Jewish brethren. Context matters, too. You ask us to laugh at a cartoon of the Prophet while ignoring the vilification of Islam across the continent (have you visited Germany lately?) and the widespread discrimination against Muslims in education, employment and public life – especially in France. You ask Muslims to denounce a handful of extremists as an existential threat to free speech while turning a blind eye to the much bigger threat to it posed by our elected leaders.</p>
<p>
Does it not bother you to see Barack Obama – who demanded that Yemen keep the anti-drone journalist <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/23/yemen-journalist-us-drone-strike-released" target="_blank">Abdulelah Haider Shaye</a> behind bars, after he was convicted on “terrorism-related charges” in a kangaroo court – jump on the free speech ban wagon? Weren’t you sickened to see Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of a country that was responsible for the killing of seven journalists in Gaza in 2014, attend the “unity rally” in Paris? Bibi was joined by Angela Merkel, chancellor of a country where Holocaust denial is punishable by up to five years in prison, and David Cameron, who wants to ban non-violent “extremists” committed to the “overthrow of democracy” from appearing on television.</p>
<p>
Then there are your readers. Will you have a word with them, please? According to a 2011 YouGov poll, 82 per cent of voters backed the prosecution of protesters who set fire to poppies.</p>
<p>
Apparently, it isn’t just Muslims who get offended.</p>
<p>
<em>Yours faithfully,</em></p>
<p>
<em>Mehdi.</em></p>
<p>
<em>Mehdi Hasan is a New Statesman contributing writer and the political director of the Huffington Post UK,<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/charlie-hebdo-free-speech_b_6462584.html?1421160931&amp;ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000067"> where this column is crossposted</a></em></p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 13 Jan 2015 13:49:20 +0000Mehdi Hasan220106 at http://www.newstatesman.comIf Mary and Joseph tried to reach Bethlehem today, they would get stuck at an Israeli checkpointhttp://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2014/12/if-mary-and-joseph-tried-reach-bethlehem-today-they-would-get-stuck-israeli
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Why is it that the plight of persecuted Christians in the Middle East, or countries such as Sudan, has attracted the attention and anger of politicians in the west, yet the Christians of Palestine don’t get a look-in?</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2014/12/460675256.jpg?itok=RMIsycMn" width="510" height="348" alt="A Palestinian man wearing a Santa Claus costume is confronted by an Israeli soldier during a demonstration in village near Bethlehem, 19 December. Photo: Getty" title="A Palestinian man wearing a Santa Claus costume is confronted by an Israeli soldier during a demonstration in village near Bethlehem, 19 December. Photo: Getty" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">A Palestinian man wearing a Santa Claus costume is confronted by an Israeli soldier during a demonstration in village near Bethlehem, 19 December. Photo: Getty</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <div style="clear:both;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">’Tis the season of Nativity scenes. But here’s a question to consider: would Joseph and Mary even have been able to reach Bethlehem if they were making that same journey today?</span></div>
<p>
How would that carpenter and his pregnant wife have circumnavigated the Kafka­esque network of Israeli settlements, roadblocks and closed military zones in the occupied West Bank? Would Mary have had to experience labour or childbirth at a checkpoint, as one in ten pregnant Palestinian women did between 2000 and 2007 (resulting in the death of at least 35 newborn babies, according to the <em>Lancet</em>)?</p>
<p>
“If Jesus were to come this year, Bethlehem would be closed,” declared Father Ibrahim Shomali, a Catholic priest of the city’s Beit Jala parish, in December 2011. “Mary and Joseph would have needed Israeli permission – or to have been tourists.”</p>
<p>
Three years on, nothing has changed. Bethlehem today is surrounded on three sides by Israel’s eight-metre-high concrete wall, cutting it off from Jerusalem just six miles to the north; the city is also encircled by 22 illegal Israeli settlements, including Nokdim – home to Israel’s far-right foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman (the only foreign minister in the world who doesn’t live inside the borders of his own country).</p>
<p>
The biblical birthplace of Christ has had large chunks of land confiscated and colonised and its tourism-dependent economy has been hit hard: the city has one of the highest unemployment rates (25 per cent) and levels of poverty (22 per cent) in the West Bank. As a result, Christians continue to emigrate from one of the holiest places of Christianity – the Christian proportion of Bethlehem’s population has dropped, in recent decades, from 95 per cent to less than a third. Overall, in 1948, Christians in Palestine accounted for roughly 18 per cent of the Arab population; today they make up less than 2 per cent of the Palestinian population of the occupied territories.</p>
<p>
So here is another question to consider: why is it that the plight of persecuted Christians in the Middle East, or countries such as Sudan, has attracted the attention and anger of politicians in the west, yet the Christians of Palestine don’t get a look-in? There are no motions, resolutions or petitions filed on their behalf; no solidarity expressed. Could it be because their persecutors aren’t Arabs or Muslims: it’s the state of Israel?</p>
<p>
The Israeli government, conveniently, blames the decline of the Palestinian Christian population on the intolerance of militant Muslim groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The problem for the Israelis is that the Christian exodus pre-dates the existence of Hamas – the creation of Israel in 1948 was marked by the expulsion of as many as 50,000 Christians from their homes – not to mention that Palestinian Christians in their own right have repeatedly refused to endorse their occupiers’ dis­ingenuous narrative. A 2006 poll by the Open Bethlehem campaign group found that 78 per cent of Christian residents of the city singled out “Israeli aggression and occupation” as “the main cause of emigration”, while a mere 3 per cent exclusively blamed the “rise of Islamic movements”.</p>
<p>
“Divide and rule” is the name of the (Israeli) game; trying to turn Palestinian Christians against Palestinian Muslims by blaming the latter for the persecution and emigration of the former; even trying to redefine what it means to be a Palestinian Christian. In February, the Knesset passed a law recognising Palestinian Christians in Israel as a minority distinct from Palestinian Muslims. Yariv Levin, the Likud politician who sponsored the law, said it would “connect us to the Christians, and I am careful not to refer to them as Arabs, because they are not Arabs”.</p>
<p>
Yet Arab Christians, and specifically Palestinian Christians, have always been at the forefront of efforts to resist Israeli expansionism: from politicians such as Hanan Ashrawi to diplomats such as Afif Safieh, who served as the PLO’s envoy in London, Washington and Moscow; from the New York-based academic Edward Said to the militant leader George Habash, who founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The current mayor of Bethlehem is Vera Baboun, a Palestinian Christian who has written of “the despair of decades of living under a foreign occupation”. The Palestinian ambassador to the UK, Manuel Hassassian, is Christian, too. “We as Christians are part and parcel of the social fabric of [Palestinian] society,” Hassassian told me, adding: “I want to celebrate Christmas in a free country.”</p>
<p>
Palestinian church leaders – Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Greek Orthodox – came together in 2009 to declare the occupation a “sin against God” and urge a boycott of Israel. What a contrast with US evangelical leaders who shamefully line up behind right-wing Israeli governments and Jewish settlers as they wait for Armageddon.</p>
<p>
Palestinian Christians complicate the simplistic narrative of “Muslims <em>v</em> Jews”; they are an inconvenient reminder that the conflict in the Holy Land has nothing to do with theology and everything to do with freedom and self-determination. Whatever your view of Jesus or Muhammad, if you are a Palestinian resident of the West Bank you are a victim of the longest military occupation in the world.</p>
<p>
“There is no difference between Christian and Muslim,” remarks a character in <em>Saraya, the Ogre’s Daughter</em>, a novel by the Palestinian Christian writer Emile Habibi. “We are all Palestinian in our predicament.” </p>
<p>
<em>Mehdi Hasan is an NS contributing writer and political director of the Huffington Post UK, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/israel-palestine-christmas_b_6365270.html?1419246351">where this column is crossposted</a></em></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 22 Dec 2014 11:08:23 +0000Mehdi Hasan218781 at http://www.newstatesman.comSorry, Myleene: yes, you can point at things and tax them. That’s what we should do to the Cityhttp://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/12/sorry-myleene-yes-you-can-point-things-and-tax-them-s-what-we-should-do-city
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A bank transaction tax would win votes.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2014/12/o-ed-miliband-facebook.jpg?itok=J4_eEGue" width="510" height="348" alt="Myleene Klass and Ed Miliband on ITV’s The Agenda." title="Myleene Klass and Ed Miliband on ITV’s The Agenda." /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Myleene Klass and Ed Miliband on ITV’s The Agenda.</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>
You can’t just point at things and tax them,” declaimed the former pop star Myleene Klass on 17 November, becoming overnight a perhaps unexpected pin-up for the right.</p>
<p>
Klass made her comment on ITV’s <em>The Agenda</em> as part of a longer rant aimed at her fellow panellist Ed Miliband, who wants to introduce a “mansion tax” on properties worth more than £2m. (What’s Klass complaining about? She sold her own home for a very modest £1.8m in 2013.) The Labour leader produced this rather feeble response: “I totally understand that people don’t like paying more in tax.”</p>
<p>
Myleene and Ed are both wrong. First, governments <em>can</em> “point at things and tax them”. The 1st-century Roman emperor Vespasian levied a tax on urine; until the mid-19th century, the British government had a tax on soap. These days, in the US, different state governments tax different things: Alabama taxes playing cards; Arkansas taxes tattoos; Colorado taxes napkins; Kansas taxes hot-air balloon rides. “Pointing and taxing” is a perk of holding office.</p>
<p>
Second, raising taxes isn’t always unpopular. Miliband’s “mansion tax” has the support of 72 per cent of voters, although he omitted to mention that on <em>The Agenda. </em>There is a range of other popular taxes out there, begging to be implemented or increased. The next Labour government, for example, could pledge to tax the UK’s 2,600-odd private schools – as the shadow education secretary, Tristram Hunt, has hinted it might – by scrapping their ludicrous “charitable” status and saving the taxpayer about £100m a year. Only 15 per cent of voters think such schools should be allowed to keep their tax-exempt status.</p>
<p>
Or Labour could listen to that notorious lefty John Major and impose a windfall tax on the profits of the “big six” energy companies, which are expected to rise by an astonishing 108 per cent in 2014. Public support for such a move: 52 per cent. It could even add a penny to the basic rate of income tax to help fund the NHS – 60 per cent of voters who expressed a view said they would support such a hike.</p>
<p>
Then there’s the financial transaction tax (FTT) – also known as the “Tobin tax” or the “Robin Hood tax” – which has the support of 61 per cent of voters. It was conceived in the 1970s by the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Tobin as a small tax that could be applied to currency transactions to “throw some sand in the well-greased wheels” of international financial markets.</p>
<p>
In 2013, it was resurrected by the European Commission as a proposed 0.1 per cent tax on the exchange of shares and bonds and a 0.01 per cent tax on derivatives and has since attracted support from 11 EU member states, including France and Germany.</p>
<p>
You might think UK politicians, looking for new sources of revenue to help reduce the deficit, would be falling over themselves to sign up. You’d be wrong. George Osborne, a wannabe leader of a Conservative Party that derives half its income from the City of London, spent £68,000 of UK taxpayers’ cash trying (and failing) to persuade the European Court of Justice to strike down the commission’s FTT. The shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, a former City minister, says he backs a financial transaction tax – but not without the participation of the US.</p>
<p>
A Tobin tax won’t raise much revenue, says Osborne, and won’t work unless it is global, says Balls. There are two pretty simple responses to these objections. The first is academic: a 2011 review of the evidence by the economists Neil McCulloch and Grazia Pacillo concluded that an FTT is “feasible” and “could make a significant contribution to revenue”. The second is practical: we already have a mini-version of an FTT in the UK – how else to describe the UK’s 0.5 per cent stamp duty on shares, which raises £3bn for the exchequer each year?</p>
<p>
This isn’t just about raising revenue, either. In 2009, Adair Turner, the then Financial Services Authority chairman, grabbed the headlines when he backed an FTT on the grounds that the City was “too big” and much of its activity “socially useless”.</p>
<p>
Austerity having kicked in globally and the mega-banks having dusted themselves down with bailout money and continued with business as usual, the list of FTT supporters has expanded over the past five years: from the billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to the former JPMorgan executive Avinash Persaud, plus the Nobel Prize-winning economists Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. In 2011, 1,000 economists – including Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs – signed an open letter to the G20’s finance ministers throwing their combined intellectual weight behind the FTT. (Sachs, incidentally, doubles up as a “personal adviser” to Osborne on development issues.)</p>
<p>
And consider some of the numbers involved. According to the Bank for International Settlements, £3.3trn was traded each day on the foreign exchange markets alone in 2013. According to the Austrian economist Stephan Schulmeister, a global FTT at a rate of 0.01 per cent could raise roughly £180bn. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research, a British FTT on its own could bring in £20bn.</p>
<p>
It really is a no-brainer: a tax that is popular with the public and backed by the experts and would raise revenue for the UK exchequer, while helping to stabilise a deeply unstable sector of the UK economy. As the 1,000 economists pointed out, an FTT is “technically feasible” and “morally right”. It is, you could say, a tax whose time has come. Even Myleene Klass might agree. </p>
<p>
<em>Mehdi Hasan is an NS contributing writer and the political director of Huffington Post UK, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/myleene-klass-ftt_b_6274342.html?1417776061&amp;ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000067">where this column is crossposted</a></em></p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 04 Dec 2014 10:40:15 +0000Mehdi Hasan217776 at http://www.newstatesman.comI was a teenage Europhile – but the EU’s sadistic austerity and lack of democracy changed my mindhttp://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/11/i-was-teenage-europhile-eu-s-sadistic-austerity-and-lack-democracy-changed-my-mind
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Fast-forward 15-odd years and my wild-eyed teenage Europhilia is a source of much embarrassment.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2014/11/134284903.jpg?itok=SuuSiOsW" width="510" height="348" alt="May’s European Parliament elections did nothing to prompt a response to the EU’s “democratic deficit”. Photo: Getty" title="May’s European Parliament elections did nothing to prompt a response to the EU’s “democratic deficit”. Photo: Getty" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">May’s European Parliament elections did nothing to prompt a response to the EU’s “democratic deficit”. Photo: Getty</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>
<em>This is a free preview of this week’s New Statesman, out today. <a href="https://subscribe.newstatesman.com/">Get your copy now</a>.</em></p>
<p>
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">“Any chance of a retweet?” the Conservative MEP and ardent Eurosceptic Daniel Hannan asked me on Twitter a few days ago. He was highlighting a video that singles out British politicians and business leaders who called for the UK to join the euro back in the late 1990s. The video is entitled, rather provocatively, </span><em style="font-size: 11pt;">Wrong Then, Wrong Now</em><span style="font-size: 11pt;">.</span></p>
<p>
I politely declined Hannan’s request, sheepishly confessing to him that . . . er . . . I happened to be one of those people who were “wrong then”. In my defence, I was a mere undergraduate, rather than a Peter Mandelson or a Richard Branson, but I did nevertheless agitate for British membership of the single currency in countless articles, essays and public debates.</p>
<p>
Fast-forward 15-odd years and my wild-eyed teenage Europhilia is a source of much embarrassment. Today, Europe is only marginally more popular with the public than ebola; hard-right parties are sweeping to victory in European elections in the UK, France and Denmark; and the eurozone has only narrowly dodged a triple-dip recession. With all this going on, it’s pretty difficult to mount a credible defence of the single currency or, for that matter, the EU itself.</p>
<p>
Let’s start with the euro. What on earth were we thinking? How could anyone with the faintest grasp of economics have believed it was anything other than sheer insanity to yoke together diverse national economies such as Greece, Ireland, Germany and Finland under a single exchange rate and a single interest rate? And, lest we forget, without a US-style system of fiscal transfers or culture of labour mobility to compensate?</p>
<p>
There were dissenting voices. Big-name US economists, from the Princeton University liberal Paul Krugman to the Harvard conservative Martin Feldstein, warned that the euro would be an “invitation to disaster” and an “economic liability”. An internal EU report later summed up the view of US economists on the euro project as: “It can’t happen, it’s a bad idea, it won’t last.”</p>
<p>
Then there’s the fiscal self-flagellation of recent years, unnecessarily “inflicted in the service of a man-made artifice, the euro”, to quote another US economist, the Nobel Prizewinner Joseph Stiglitz. Has there ever been a better advert for the failure of austerity? Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, in particular, have been brutalised by the fiscally sadistic policies demanded by the “troika” of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission – and backed by the dead-eyed deficit hawks in Germany. In Greece, malaria returned for the first time in 40 years; in Spain, students in Catalonia had their toilet paper rationed; in Portugal, soup kitchens proliferated; in Ireland, suicides among men rose sharply. While the eurozone continues its orgy of self-harm, the broader EU is in the midst of an unprecedented and existential political crisis: a crisis of democracy, accountability and legitimacy, with citizens feeling ever less connected to the decision-makers in Brussels and Strasbourg.</p>
<p>
Did May’s European Parliament election results – described as a political “earthquake” by the French prime minister, Manuel Valls – convince the continent’s leaders, both elected and unelected, to take a step back and try to tackle the EU’s “democratic deficit”? If only. Despite turnout declining in every single set of European parliamentary elections since they were first introduced in 1979 – and despite the European Commission’s polling suggesting that trust in EU institutions, at 31 per cent, is at an all-time low – members of the EU elite march on towards “ever closer union”, incompetently, indifferently, in denial.</p>
<p>
Consider Viviane Reding, the former EC vice-president. In a recent interview with me for my al-Jazeera show <em>Head to Head</em>, she urged her former colleagues on the (unelected) EU commission to behave “like [an] army” and a “government” moving forward at “full speed”. “You cannot have 28 [member states] doing whatever they want,” Reding told me.</p>
<p>
It’s as if the European elections never happened. As Bertolt Brecht once put it, “Would it not be easier . . . for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?” Or as the new EC president, Jean-Claude Juncker, pompously proclaimed, in reference to the 2005 French referendum on the EU constitution: “If it’s a Yes, we will say, ‘On we go,’ and if it’s a No, we will say, ‘We continue.’”</p>
<p>
That isn’t a description of democracy that I recognise. To talk of a “democratic deficit” at the heart of the EU project would be a gross understatement. If the EU were a nation state and tried to join the EU, it would probably be rejected for not being democratic enough.</p>
<p>
So, where have all of its progressive critics gone? The left across Europe has been seduced by the EU’s promise of workers’ rights – forgetting that you can’t enjoy those rights if you don’t have a job to begin with. Mass unemployment is now a fact of life across swaths of the EU and, especially, the eurozone. More than half of young people are jobless in both Greece and Spain, yet unelected Eurocrats still want more growth-choking austerity.</p>
<p>
This is a political and economic scandal, not to mention a human tragedy. And progressives should be saying so. But the left in the UK has ceded all the Eurosceptic terrain to the xenophobes and the “Little Englanders”, to Ukip and the Tory right. We were wrong then. Let’s not be wrong now.</p>
<p>
<em>Mehdi Hasan is a contributing writer at the NS and the political director of Huffington Post UK, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/eu-referendum-democracy_b_6190712.html?1416481790&amp;ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000067">where this column is crossposted</a>. His “Head to Head” with Viviane Reding will be broadcast on al-Jazeera English on 28 November</em></p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 20 Nov 2014 11:15:06 +0000Mehdi Hasan216471 at http://www.newstatesman.comWhy arming the Kurds is the only option – even for anti-war progressives in the westhttp://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/10/why-arming-kurds-only-option-even-anti-war-progressives-west
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These Kurdish units, which include all-women militias, have to all intents and purposes become the last line of defence against the genocidal fanatics of Islamic State.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2014/10/457434944.jpg?itok=ltbnaB7J" width="510" height="348" alt="People watch from the Turkish-Syria border as Kurdish fighters in the city of Kobani fight Islamic State militants. Photo: Getty" title="People watch from the Turkish-Syria border as Kurdish fighters in the city of Kobani fight Islamic State militants. Photo: Getty" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">People watch from the Turkish-Syria border as Kurdish fighters in the city of Kobani fight Islamic State militants. Photo: Getty</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>
Quiz question: who said that the west must “strengthen the Kurdish fighters, who are doing a good job of fighting Isil”? Was it: a) US senator John McCain, b) former prime minister Tony Blair, or c) Respect MP, George Galloway? Yep, you guessed right. It wasn’t the neocon McCain or the “liberal interventionist” Blair. It was the anti-war Galloway, in a House of Commons debate on Iraq in late September.</p>
<p>
It isn’t a contradiction to be anti-war and left-wing at the same time as being pro-Kurd and in favour of arming the Kurds. I have been a long-standing opponent of western military interventions in the Muslim-majority world, almost all of which – from Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 to Libya in 2011 – have resulted in civilian bloodshed and terrorist blowback. But I’m not a pacifist. And to pretend that the response to the beheaders, rapists and slave traders of the self-styled “Islamic State” (or IS) need not involve an element of brute military force is either ludicrously naive or disgracefully disingenuous.</p>
<p>
So, too, is the lazy obsession with air strikes. “Wars, historically, have never been won by air power alone,” General David Richards, the former chief of the defence staff, told me in a recent interview, as he called for “boots on the ground”.</p>
<p>
Another foreign military occupation of Iraq – or, for that matter, Syria – would be a disaster. More bloodshed, more blowback. There are, however, secular and Sunni boots already on the ground that we should all be backing against the jihadists of IS – those of Kurdish fighters not just in northern Iraq, where the <em>peshmerga</em> (literally, “those who confront death”) have fended off IS attempts to bring Erbil and Kirkuk under its terror-inspired “caliphate”, but also in northern Syria, where the People’s Protection Units (YPG) of the Kurds’ Democratic Union Party (PYD) have been heroically holding off IS in the town of Kobane for more than a month now.</p>
<p>
These Kurdish units, which include all-women militias, have to all intents and purposes become the last line of defence against the genocidal fanatics of IS. They are, as even Galloway observed, doing a “good job”. But they can’t do it alone, especially against IS militants equipped with US-made tanks seized in Iraq. Progressives in the west, especially of the anti-war variety, need to get behind the Kurds, loudly and publicly. First, we owe them. Kurds constitute the biggest stateless minority in the world, with a population of roughly 30 million, divided mainly between Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. They have been bombed in Turkey, executed in Iran, gassed in Iraq and besieged in Syria. Oh, and betrayed by the west. Repeatedly.</p>
<p>
Second, they are worth fighting for. Take northern Syria, where the three autonomous and Kurdish-majority provinces of Rojava have avoided the worst excesses of the civil war and engaged in what David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, has described as a “remarkable democratic experiment”, ceding power to “popular assemblies” and “women’s and youth councils”. Why would any progressive want to allow the revolutionary Kurds of Kobane to fall to the theocratic maniacs of IS?</p>
<p>
Third, the Turks next door have sat on their hands. The crisis could have been an opportunity for Turkey, under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to build a new long-term alliance with his country’s embittered Kurdish minority against extremism and sectarianism. The Kurds’ PYD in Syria, however, is an offshoot of Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been locked in a violent conflict with Ankara over Kurdish autonomy since 1984. Erdogan thus decided to seal Turkey’s border with Syria, in effect giving the green light to IS militants to seize Kobane and massacre its PKK-affiliated populace – and then to bomb PKK positions in southern Turkey for the first time since the group agreed to participate in a peace process in March 2013.</p>
<p>
Shamelessly echoing the mantra of the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, that “Hamas is Isis, Isis is Hamas”, Erdogan told reporters on 4 October: “For us, the PKK is the same as [IS].” The irony is that if it were the same as IS, Turkey would have done a lot more to help. The Turkish-Syrian border hasn’t been closed to IS fighters, only to PKK fighters. On 20 October, Turkey finally agreed to allow Kurdish fighters to cross the border into Syria, but only Kurds from Iraq and not from Turkey – and not with heavy weaponry, which is the main request of the YPG fighters in Kobane.</p>
<p>
I asked a senior Turkish diplomat whether his country was prepared to take responsibility for the fall of the town to the jihadists. “We don’t care,” he replied defiantly. “We don’t care what the world thinks. We won’t be bullied by anyone.” He needn’t be worried. Western governments have never lifted a finger to help Turkey’s Kurds – or, by extension, Syria’s. They’re the wrong sort of Kurds, victims of a Nato ally, rather than a gang of jihadists. (“Kurds in Turkey are ‘terrorists’, but Kurds in Iraq are ‘freedom fighters’ and we’re not quite sure about the present status of the Iranian Kurds,” Tariq Ali once joked.)</p>
<p>
So progressives need to get behind the Kurds, especially the brave Kurds of Kobane. Is there a danger that their struggle will be co-opted by western governments, which often shape outcomes in the Middle East to suit their own interests? Yes. Is there an alternative stance open to progressives, given how squeezed the Kurds are between Bashar al-Assad, Erdogan and IS? No. “Freedom,” in the words of an old Kurdish proverb, “is never given but taken.” </p>
<p>
<em>Mehdi Hasan is an NS contributing writer. He works for Al Jazeera English and the Huffington Post UK, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/islamic-state-arming-kurds_b_6032922.html?1414054225&amp;ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000067">where this column is crossposted</a></em></p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 23 Oct 2014 08:55:23 +0000Mehdi Hasan214571 at http://www.newstatesman.comThe first “war on terror” was a failure. Do we really need a sequel?http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/09/first-war-terror-was-failure-do-we-really-need-sequel
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Just because there are no good options in Iraq doesn’t mean we have to pick the worst option.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2014/09/455539044.jpg?itok=v7FANtcD" width="510" height="348" alt="An Iraqi-Kurdish fighter at a checkpoint west of Arbil. Photo: Getty" title="An Iraqi-Kurdish fighter at a checkpoint west of Arbil. Photo: Getty" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">An Iraqi-Kurdish fighter at a checkpoint west of Arbil. Photo: Getty</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>
It’s difficult to disagree with the verdict of Barack Obama. The Isis terrorists, the US president declared in a televised address on 10 September, “are unique in their brutality . . . They enslave, rape and force women into marriage. They threatened a religious minority with genocide. In acts of barbarism, they took the lives of two American journalists – Jim Foley and Steven Sotloff.” (On 13 September, they also beheaded the brave British aid worker David Haines.)</p>
<p>
Isis, in other words, is evil. Scum. The worst of the worst. Unique, to borrow Obama’s phrase, in its brutality. Nevertheless, it isn’t difficult to disagree with the solution proffered by the president and his new neocon pals. “We are at war [and] we must do what it takes, for as long as it takes, to win,” declaimed Dick Cheney, the former US vice-president. “What’s the harm of bombing them at least for a few weeks and seeing what happens?” asked the pundit William Kristol.</p>
<p>
Forget for a moment the legality of bombing Iraq without congressional approval, or bombing Syria without UN approval. Put to one side, also, the morality of dropping bombs from 5,000 feet on towns in northern Iraq that are full of civilians.</p>
<p>
The bigger issue is that military action might make us feel better about ourselves and it might even “degrade” Isis but it won’t “destroy” it (to use Obama’s preferred terminology). How will dropping bombs destroy the hate-filled ideology behind the terrorist group? How will air strikes prevent foreign fighters returning home to the west to carry out revenge attacks? How will killing innocent Iraqi Sunnis “in the crossfire” stop Isis from recruiting new and angry fighters from inside Iraq’s Sunni communities? How will cruise missiles produce an inclusive government in Baghdad, one that heals the long-standing rifts between Kurds, Shias and Sunnis and encourages the Sunnis to turn their backs on Isis, as they did on al-Qaeda in 2006 and 2007? How will despatching drones help generate a national civic identity that makes Iraqis feel united as a single people, rather than part of a patchwork of warring tribes and sects?</p>
<p>
If bombing “worked”, Iraq would have morphed into a Scandinavia-style utopia long ago. Remember, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Obama is the fourth US president in a row to appear live on television in order to announce air strikes on Iraq.</p>
<p>
Remember also that the US and its allies have been dropping ordnance on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Libya, among other countries, since 2001. Yet, today, the Taliban is resurgent in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, while al-Qaeda is opening new branches of its terror franchise in India; Libya is in chaos, with Islamist militias vying for control and the government in exile hiding out on a Greek car ferry; and US air strikes in Yemen, according to a former US embassy official in Sana’a, generate “roughly 40 to 60 new enemies for every [al-Qaeda] operative killed by drones”.</p>
<p>
“It’s hard to think of any American project in the Middle East that is not now at or near a dead end,” said Chas Freeman, a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, in July. Why? “The United States seldom resorts to diplomacy in resolving major differences . . . Coercive measures like sanctions and bombing are much more immediately satisfying emotionally than the long slog of diplomacy.” Or as the economist and senior UN adviser Jeffrey Sachs recently tweeted, “US has a one-note foreign policy: bomb.”</p>
<p>
Once again, we are confronted with the myth of redemptive violence, the belief that the application of superior western air power is ultimately just, noble and necessary. Wanting vengeance for Foley, Sotloff and Haines, not to mention the thousands of unnamed Syrians and Iraqis slaughtered by Isis, is understandable. Vengeance, however, is no substitute for a viable strategy.</p>
<p>
As Richard Barrett, the former MI6 head of counterterrorism, warned me in a recent interview, it’s a mistake to see air strikes as a “tool that is going to solve the [Islamic State] problem . . . It’s just reaching for a hammer because it is a hammer and it’s to hand.”</p>
<p>
So what’s to be done? First, just because there are no good options in Iraq doesn’t mean we have to pick the worst option: a tried, tested and failed option. Yes, air strikes can keep Isis fighters away from Erbil but they cannot eradicate Isis.</p>
<p>
Second, there is a range of political steps that must be taken – from guaranteeing Sunni participation in the new Iraqi government to cracking down on the oil sales worth $100m a month that fund the Isis reign of terror. Then there is the regional cold war that has helped fuel the hot wars in Iraq and Syria. Getting Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran to a negotiating table, Richard Barrett explained, would have “much more impact [on Iraq] than flying out and dropping bombs”.</p>
<p>
We can’t talk to Isis but we can talk to Saudi Arabia (and, for that matter, to Turkey, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates). And, yes, to Iran, too. The Iranians can put pressure on the dysfunctional Shia-led government in Baghdad; the Saudis can do the same with the disaffected Sunni tribes that have allied with Isis.</p>
<p>
Instead, Obama, with David Cameron in support, prepares for a new, US-led, three-year military campaign, across two countries, against the thugs and gangsters of Isis, even though 13 years of the so-called war on terror – stretching from Afghanistan to Pakistan, Iraq to Yemen, Libya to Somalia – have produced only more war and more terror. Do we really want a sequel?</p>
<p>
<em>Mehdi Hasan is an NS contributing writer. He works for Al Jazeera English and the Huffington Post UK, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/war-on-terror-isis_b_5841406.html">where this column is crossposted</a></em></p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 18 Sep 2014 11:24:42 +0000Mehdi Hasan211111 at http://www.newstatesman.comInside jobs and Israeli stooges: why is the Muslim world in thrall to conspiracy theories?http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/09/inside-jobs-and-israeli-stooges-why-muslim-world-thrall-conspiracy-theories
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The “We’ve been lied to” argument goes only so far. Scepticism may be evidence of a healthy and independent mindset; but conspiracism is a virus that feeds off insecurity and bitterness.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2014/09/103301927.jpg?itok=MG3ovmyj" width="510" height="348" alt="The outskirts of Sukkur in Pakistan in 2010. Photo: Getty" title="The outskirts of Sukkur in Pakistan in 2010. Photo: Getty" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">There's a theory out there that the 2010 floods in Pakistan were caused by secret US military technology. . . Photo: Getty</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>
Did you know that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Isis, was trained by Mossad and the CIA? Were you aware that his real name isn’t Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri al-Samarrai but Simon Elliot? Or that he’s a Jewish actor who was recruited by the Israelis to play the part of the world’s most wanted terrorist?</p>
<p>
If the messages in my email in-box and my Twitter timeline and on my Facebook page are anything to go by, plenty of Muslims are not only willing to believe this nonsensical drivel but are super-keen to share it with their friends. The bizarre claim that NSA documents released by Edward Snowden “prove” the US and Israel are behind al-Baghdadi’s actions has gone viral.</p>
<p>
There’s only one problem. “It’s utter BS,” Glenn Greenwald, the investigative journalist who helped break the NSA story, told me. “Snowden never said anything like that and no [NSA] documents suggest it.” Snowden’s lawyer, Ben Wizner, has called the story a hoax.</p>
<p>
But millions of Muslims across the globe have a soft spot for such hoaxes. Conspiracy theories are rife in both Muslim-majority countries and Muslim communities here in the west. The events of 9/11 and the subsequent “war on terror” unleashed a vast array of hoaxers, hucksters and fantasists from Birmingham to Beirut.</p>
<p>
On a visit to Iraq in 2002, I met a senior Islamic cleric who told me that Jews, not Arabs, had been responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He loudly repeated the Middle East’s most popular and pernicious 9/11 conspiracy theory: that 4,000 Jews didn’t turn up for work on 11 September 2001 because they had been forewarned about the attacks.</p>
<p>
There is, of course, no evidence for this outlandish and offensive claim. The truth is that more than 200 Jews, including several Israeli citizens, were killed in the attacks on the twin towers. I guess they must have missed the memo from Mossad.</p>
<p>
Yet the denialism persists. A Pew poll in 2011, a decade after 9/11, found that a majority of respondents in countries such as Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon refused to believe that the attacks were carried out by Arab members of al-Qaeda. “There is no Muslim public in which even 30 per cent accept that Arabs conducted the attacks,” the Pew researchers noted.</p>
<p>
This blindness isn’t peculiar to the Arab world or the Middle East. Consider Pakistan, home to many of the world’s weirdest and wackiest conspiracy theories. Some Pakistanis say the schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai is a CIA agent. Others think that the heavy floods of 2010, which killed 2,000 Pakistanis, were caused by secret US military technology. And two out of three don’t believe Osama Bin Laden was killed by US navy Seals on Pakistani soil on 2 May 2011.</p>
<p>
Consider also Nigeria, where there was a polio outbreak in 2003 after local people boycotted the vaccine, claiming it was a western plot to infect Muslims with HIV. Then there is Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, where leading politicians and journalists blamed the 2002 Bali bombings on US agents.</p>
<p>
Why are so many of my fellow Muslims so gullible and so quick to believe bonkers conspiracy theories? How have the pedlars of paranoia amassed such influence within Muslim communities?</p>
<p>
First, we should be fair: it’s worth noting that Muslim-majority nations have been on the receiving end of various actual conspiracies. France and Britain did secretly conspire to carve up the Middle East between them with the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. They also conspired to attack Egypt, with Israel’s help, and thereby provoked the Suez crisis of 1956. Oh, and it turned out there weren’t any WMDs in Iraq in 2003 despite what the dossiers claimed.</p>
<p>
I once asked the Pakistani politician Imran Khan why his fellow citizens were so keen on conspiracy theories. “They’re lied to all the time by their leaders,” he replied. “If a society is used to listening to lies all the time . . . everything becomes a conspiracy.”</p>
<p>
The “We’ve been lied to” argument goes only so far. Scepticism may be evidence of a healthy and independent mindset; but conspiracism is a virus that feeds off insecurity and bitterness. As the former Pakistani diplomat Husain Haqqani has admitted, “the contemporary Muslim fascination for conspiracy theories” is a convenient way of “explaining the powerlessness of a community that was at one time the world’s economic, scientific, political and military leader”.</p>
<p>
Nor is this about ignorance or illiteracy. Those who promulgate a paranoid, conspiratorial world-view within Muslim communities include the highly educated and highly qualified, the rulers as well as the ruled. A recent conspiracy theory blaming the rise of Islamic State on the US government, based on fabricated quotes from Hillary Clinton’s new memoir, was publicly endorsed by Lebanon’s foreign minister and Egypt’s culture minister.</p>
<p>
Where will it end? When will credulous Muslims stop leaning on the conspiracy crutch? We blame sinister outside powers for all our problems – extremism, despotism, corruption and the rest – and paint ourselves as helpless victims rather than indepen­dent agents. After all, why take responsibility for our actions when it’s far easier to point the finger at the CIA/Mossad/the Jews/the Hindus/fill-in-your-villain-of-choice?</p>
<p>
As the Egyptian intellectual Abd al-Munim Said once observed, “The biggest problem with conspiracy theories is that they keep us not only from the truth, but also from confronting our faults and problems.” They also make us look like loons. Can we give it a rest, please? </p>
<p>
<em>Mehdi Hasan is an New Statesman contributing writer, and works for al-Jazeera English and the Huffington Post UK <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/conspiracy-theories-islam_b_5770576.html">where this column is crossposted</a></em></p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 05 Sep 2014 11:29:07 +0000Mehdi Hasan209801 at http://www.newstatesman.comWhat the jihadists who bought “Islam for Dummies” on Amazon tell us about radicalisationhttp://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2014/08/what-jihadists-who-bought-islam-dummies-amazon-tell-us-about-radicalisation
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>
Pretending that the danger comes only from the devout could cost lives.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2014/08/photo_05.jpg?itok=Lklc54P2" width="510" height="348" alt="The cast of Chris Morris’s black comedy Four Lions. Photo: Magnolia Pictures" title="The cast of Chris Morris’s black comedy Four Lions. Photo: Magnolia Pictures" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Ministers and security chiefs could learn a thing or two from Chris Morris’s black comedy Four Lions. Photo: Magnolia Pictures</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>
Can you guess which books the wannabe jihadists Yusuf Sarwar and Mohammed Ahmed ordered online from Amazon before they set out from Birmingham to fight in Syria last May? A copy of <em>Milestones</em> by the Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb? No. How about <em>Messages to the World: the Statements of Osama Bin Laden</em>? Guess again. Wait, <em>The Anarchist Cookbook</em>, right? Wrong.</p>
<p>
Sarwar and Ahmed, both of whom pleaded guilty to terrorism offences last month, purchased <em>Islam for Dummies</em> and <em>The Koran for Dummies</em>. You could not ask for better evidence to bolster the argument that the 1,400-year-old Islamic faith has little to do with the modern jihadist movement. The swivel-eyed young men who take sadistic pleasure in bombings and beheadings may try to justify their violence with recourse to religious rhetoric – think the killers of Lee Rigby screaming “Allahu Akbar” at their trial; think of Islamic State beheading the photojournalist James Foley as part of its “holy war” – but religious fervour isn’t what motivates most of them.</p>
<p>
In 2008, a classified briefing note on radicalisation, prepared by MI5’s behavioural science unit, was leaked to the <em>Guardian</em>. It revealed that, “far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy and could . . . be regarded as religious novices.” The analysts concluded that “a well-established religious identity actually protects against violent radicalisation”, the newspaper said.</p>
<p>
For more evidence, read the books of the forensic psychiatrist and former CIA officer Marc Sageman; the political scientist Robert Pape; the international relations scholar Rik Coolsaet; the Islamism expert Olivier Roy; the anthropologist Scott Atran. They have all studied the lives and backgrounds of hundreds of gun-toting, bomb-throwing jihadists and they all agree that Islam isn’t to blame for the behaviour of such men (and, yes, they usually are men).</p>
<p>
Instead they point to other drivers of radicalisation: moral outrage, disaffection, peer pressure, the search for a new identity, for a sense of belonging and purpose. As Atran pointed out in testimony to the US Senate in March 2010: “. . . what inspires the most lethal terrorists in the world today is not so much the Quran or religious teachings as a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends, and through friends, eternal respect and remembrance in the wider world”. He described wannabe jihadists as “bored, under­employed, overqualified and underwhelmed” young men for whom “jihad is an egalitarian, equal-opportunity employer . . . thrilling, glorious and cool”.</p>
<p>
Or, as Chris Morris, the writer and director of the 2010 black comedy <em>Four Lions</em> – which satirised the ignorance, incompetence and sheer banality of British Muslim jihadists – once put it: “Terrorism is about ideology, but it’s also about berks.”</p>
<p>
Berks, not martyrs. “Pathetic figures”, to quote the former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove, not holy warriors. If we want to tackle jihadism, we need to stop exaggerating the threat these young men pose and giving them the oxygen of publicity they crave, and start highlighting how so many of them lead decidedly un-Islamic lives.</p>
<p>
When he lived in the Philippines in the 1990s, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, described as “the principal architect” of the 11 September attacks by the 9/11 Commission, once flew a helicopter past a girlfriend’s office building with a banner saying “I love you”. His nephew Ramzi Yousef, sentenced to life in prison for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, also had a girlfriend and, like his uncle, was often spotted in Manila’s red-light district. The FBI agent who hunted Yousef said that he “hid behind a cloak of Islam”. Eyewitness accounts suggest the 9/11 hijackers were visiting bars and strip clubs in Florida and Las Vegas in the run-up to the attacks. The Spanish neighbours of Hamid Ahmidan, convicted for his role in the Madrid train bombings of 2004, remember him “zooming by on a motorcycle with his long-haired girlfriend, a Spanish woman with a taste for revealing outfits”, according to press reports.</p>
<p>
Religion does, of course, play a role: in particular, a perverted and politicised form of Islam acts as an “emotional vehicle” (to quote Atran), as a means of articulating anger and mobilising masses in the Muslim-majority world. But to pretend that the danger comes only from the devout could cost lives. Whatever the <em>Daily Mail</em> or Michael Gove might have you believe, long beards and flowing robes aren’t indicators of radicalisation; ultra-conservative or reactionary views don’t automatically lead to violent acts. Muslims aren’t all Islamists, Islamists aren’t all jihadists and jihadists aren’t all devout. To claim otherwise isn’t only factually inaccurate; it could be fatal.</p>
<p>
Consider <em>Four Lions</em>. Omar is the nice, clean-shaven, thoroughly modern ringleader of a gang of wannabe suicide bombers; he reads Disney stories to his son, sings Toploader’s “Dancing in the Moonlight” with his mates and is pretty uninterested in Muslim beliefs or practices. Meanwhile, his brother Ahmed is a religious fundamentalist, a big-bearded Salafist who can’t bear to make eye contact with women and thinks laughter is un-Islamic but who, crucially, has no time for violence or jihad. The police raid the home of peaceful Ahmed, rather than Omar, allowing Omar to escape and launch an attack on . . . a branch of Boots.</p>
<p>
Back in the real world, as would-be jihadists buy books such as <em>Islam for Dummies</em>, ministers and security chiefs should venture online and order DVDs of <em>Four Lions</em>. They might learn a thing or two. </p>
<p>
<em>Mehdi Hasan is an NS contributing writer, and works for al-Jazeera English and the Huffington Post UK, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/jihadist-radicalisation-islam-for-dummies_b_5697160.html">where this column is crossposted </a></em></p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 21 Aug 2014 09:06:20 +0000Mehdi Hasan208616 at http://www.newstatesman.comFrom Egypt to Saudi Arabia, the Arab world has abandoned the Palestinianshttp://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/08/egypt-saudi-arabia-arab-world-has-abandoned-palestinians
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The inconvenient truth is that the collective punishment of the Pales­tinian people in Gaza is a collective endeavour in its own right – led by Israel, enforced by Egypt, endorsed by Saudi Arabia.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2014/08/453326164.jpg?itok=Tz2fpMrC" width="510" height="348" alt="A Palestinian boy plays with balloons as families leave their homes in Gaza City&#039;s Shejaiya neighbourhood. Photo: Getty" title="A Palestinian boy plays with balloons as families leave their homes in Gaza City&#039;s Shejaiya neighbourhood. Photo: Getty" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">A Palestinian boy plays with balloons as families leave their homes in Gaza City's Shejaiya neighbourhood. Photo: Getty</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>
Forget for one moment the timid pronouncements of Barack Obama and David Cameron. When will Arab rulers dare raise their voice against Israel’s pounding of Gaza? “I have never seen a situation like it, where you have so many Arab states acquiescing in the death and destruction in Gaza and the pummelling of Hamas,” the former US diplomat Aaron David Miller, who advised Presidents Clinton and Bush on the Middle East, told the <em>New York Times </em>on 30 July. Their silence, he said, “is deafening”.</p>
<p>
But their silence isn’t the worst part; their complicity is. Take the collective punishment of the 1.8 million inhabitants of Gaza which is referred to as the “blockade”. Israeli officials may have bragged to their US counterparts that they wanted to “keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge”, but they couldn’t have maintained their seven-year siege of Gaza without help.</p>
<p>
Remember: Israel controls only three sides of the strip. Who controls the fourth? Egypt, the proud, self-styled “heart of the Arab world”. Yet, from Air Chief Marshal Hosni Mubarak to General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the Arab Republic of Egypt has been a keen accomplice in Israel’s strangulation of Gaza. The former Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohammed Morsi, may have been willing to consider easing the blockade between 2012 and 2013, but Sisi, “elected” president in May this year after a military coup, is a sworn enemy of the Brotherhood and its Hamas affiliate.</p>
<p>
In recent months, the junta in Cairo has resealed its border with Gaza, destroyed most of the tunnels that were lifelines for its residents and allowed a mere 140 injured Palestinians to cross into Egypt through Rafah – the only exit from the Strip that isn’t controlled by the Israelis. The blockade of Gaza is, thus, a joint Israeli-Egyptian crime.</p>
<p>
Consider also the stance of Saudi Arabia. “Attack on Gaza by Saudi royal appointment”, read the headline on a Huffington Post blog on 20 July by the veteran foreign correspondent David Hearst, who claimed that “Mossad and Saudi intelligence officials meet regularly . . . and they are hand in glove on Iran”.</p>
<p>
On 1 August, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia released a statement denouncing the killings in Gaza as a “collective massacre” but conveniently, as the Associated Press pointed out, “stopped short of directly condemning Israel” and “did not call for any specific action to be taken against Israel”. Meanwhile, the kingdom’s Grand Mufti, Abdul Aziz al ash-Sheikh, claimed that pro-Palestinian demonstrations were “just demagogic actions that won’t help Palestinians”.</p>
<p>
Then there is Syria. The Respect MP, George Galloway, may have praised the Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad once as the “last Arab ruler” because of the latter’s supposed willingness to stand up to Israel, but Assad’s brutal security forces have bombed and besieged the Palestinian refugees of Yarmouk, on the outskirts of Damascus. According to Amnesty International, Syrian forces have also been “committing war crimes by using starvation of civilians as a weapon” and have forced the refugees to “resort to eating cats and dogs”.</p>
<p>
The rest of the Arab countries don’t have much better records. In Lebanon, 400,000-odd Palestinian refugees languish in refugee camps where the conditions are nothing short of horrific. They are prevented by law from working in the public sector or using state medical and education facilities and are also barred from buying property.</p>
<p>
In Jordan, ethnic Jordanians or “East Bankers” resent the “West Bank” Palestinian majority, including their queen, Rania. And in Kuwait in 1991, after the first Gulf war, as many as 200,000 Palestinians were forced out of the country as punishment for Yasser Arafat’s support for Saddam Hussein; up to 4,000 Palestinians were reportedly killed in vigilante attacks.</p>
<p>
This Arab betrayal of the Palestinian cause has deep roots. In his 1988 book, <em>Collusion Across the Jordan</em>, the Israeli-British historian Avi Shlaim described how King Abdullah of (what was then) Transjordan worked with the Israelis, behind the scenes, to prevent the Palestinians from establishing their own state in 1948.</p>
<p>
“Palestine has been the dominant issue on the agenda of the Arab League since its birth in 1945,” Shlaim, now emeritus professor of international relations at Oxford, tells me. “But ideological commitment to the Palestinian cause has never been translated into effective support. “So one has to distinguish between the rhetorical and the practical level of Arab foreign policy.”</p>
<p>
Today, most of the unelected leaders of the Arab world, from the generals of North Africa to the petromonarchs of the Gulf, see the Muslim Brotherhood and fellow-travellers such as Hamas as a bigger threat to their own rule than the Israel Defence Forces. Only the emirate of Qatar maintains close ties with both the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Hamas in Gaza; the rest of the region’s despots and dictators would be delighted to see the Israelis deliver a knockout blow to the Sunni Islamists of Gaza – and, for that matter, to the Shia Islamists of Iran.</p>
<p>
Let’s be clear: the inconvenient truth is that the collective punishment of the Pales­tinian people in Gaza is a collective endeavour in its own right – led by Israel, enforced by Egypt, endorsed by Saudi Arabia.</p>
<p>
Pity the poor Palestinians. Their territories are occupied by the Jewish state; their cause is abandoned by the Arab world. </p>
<p>
<em>Mehdi Hasan is an NS contributing writer, and works for al-Jazeera English and the Huffington Post UK, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/from-egypt-to-saudi-arabi_b_5662098.html?1407511876&amp;ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000067" target="_blank">where this column is crossposted</a> </em></p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 08 Aug 2014 15:34:49 +0000Mehdi Hasan207586 at http://www.newstatesman.comWe single Israel out because we in the west are shamefully complicit in its crimes http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/07/we-single-israel-out-because-we-west-are-shamefully-complicit-its-crimes
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The assault on Gaza has been a humanitarian disaster, yet the west's staunch support for Israel continues.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2014/07/452224304.jpg?itok=fnfOp_RG" width="510" height="348" alt="Palestinian firefighters survey the scene of a house destroyed during an Israeli strike. Photo: Getty" title="Palestinian firefighters survey the scene of a house destroyed during an Israeli strike. Photo: Getty" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Palestinian firefighters survey the scene of a house destroyed during an Israeli strike. Photo: Getty</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>
Seventeen members of a single family wiped out in a missile strike. A centre for disabled people bombed. Schools and mosques attacked. Operation Protective Edge has been a humanitarian disaster for the residents of Gaza. This, apparently, is how Israel defines “self-defence”.</p>
<p>
The experts disagree. The UN’s top human rights official, Navi Pillay, has said the killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza raises “serious doubt . . . whether the Israeli strikes have been in accordance with international humanitarian law”. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have gone further, urging the hapless president, Mahmoud Abbas, to make the Palestinian Authority join the International Criminal Court and bring war crimes charges against Israel.</p>
<p>
For its many supporters in the west, Israel is being unfairly singled out for criticism. As the country’s former foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami angrily said to me in an interview for al-Jazeera English in 2013: “You are trying to turn Israel into a special case.”</p>
<p>
According to the likes of Ben-Ami, there are much more vile regimes, and more violent groups, elsewhere in the world. Why pick on plucky Israel? What about the Chinas, Russias, Syrias, Saudi Arabias, Irans, Sudans and Burmas? Where are the protests against Isis, Boko Haram or the Pakistani Taliban?</p>
<p>
There are various possible responses to such attempts at deflection. First, does Israel really want to be held to the standards of the world’s worst countries? Doesn’t Israel claim to be a liberal democracy, the “only” one in the Middle East?</p>
<p>
Second, isn’t this “whataboutery” of the worst sort? David Cameron told those of us who opposed the Nato intervention in Libya in 2011: “The fact that you cannot do the right thing everywhere does not mean that you should not do the right thing somewhere.” Well, quite. And the same surely applies to criticism of Israel – that we cannot, or do not, denounce every other human-rights-abusing regime on earth doesn’t automatically mean we are therefore prohibited from speaking out against Israel’s abuses in Gaza and the West Bank. (Nor, for that matter, does the presence of a small minority among the Jewish state’s critics who are undoubtedly card-carrying anti-Semites.)</p>
<p>
Trying to hide Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians behind, say, Syria’s barrel bombs, China’s forced labour camps or Russia’s persecution of gays won’t wash. After all, on what grounds did we “single out” apartheid South Africa in the 1980s for condemnation and boycott? Weren’t there other, more dictatorial regimes in Africa at the time, those run by black Africans such as Mengistu in Ethiopia or Mobutu in Zaire? Did we dare excuse the crimes of white Afrikaners on this basis?</p>
<p>
Taking a moral stand inevitably requires us to be selective, specific and, yes, even inconsistent. “Some forms of injustice bother [people] more than others,” wrote Peter Beinart, the author of <em>The Crisis of Zionism</em>, in December 2013. “The roots of this inconsistency may be irrational, even disturbing, but it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t act against the abuses they care about most.”</p>
<p>
Third, Israel is “singled out” today, but by its friends and not just by its enemies. It has been singled out for unparalleled support – financial, military, diplomatic – by the western powers. It is indeed, to quote Ben-Ami, a “special case”.</p>
<p>
Which other country is in receipt of $3bn a year in US aid, despite maintaining a 47-year military occupation in violation of international law? Which other country has been allowed to develop and stockpile nuclear weapons in secret?</p>
<p>
Which other country’s prime minister could “humiliate” – to quote the newspaper <em>Ma’ariv</em> – a sitting US vice-president on his visit to Israel in March 2010, yet still receive 29 standing ovations from Congress on his own visit to the US a year later? And which other country is the beneficiary of comically one-sided resolutions on Capitol Hill, in which members of Congress fall over each other to declare their undying love and support for Israel – by 410 to eight, or 352 to 21, or 390 to five?</p>
<p>
Indeed, which other country has been protected from UN Security Council censure by the US deployment of an astonishing 42 vetoes? For the record, the number of US vetoes exercised at the UN on behalf of Israel is greater than the number of vetoes exercised by all other UN member states on all other issues put together. Singling out, anyone?</p>
<p>
Fourth, the inconvenient truth is that we in the west can happily decry the likes of, say, Assad or Ayatollah Khamenei yet we can do little to influence their actual behaviour. Have sanctions stopped Assad’s killing machine? Or Iran’s nuclear programme? In contrast, we have plenty of leverage over Israel – from trade deals to arms sales to votes at the UN. Israel is our special friend, our close ally.</p>
<p>
Yet when Israel started bombing Gaza this month, claiming it was acting in response to incoming rocket fire and was trying to kill Hamas operatives, Cameron merely “reiterated the UK’s staunch support for Israel” and “underlined Israel’s right to defend itself”. And the hundreds of Palestinian dead? Didn’t they have a right to self- defence? There was not a word from our PM. This, ultimately, is the fundamental difference when it comes to comparing Israel’s abuses with those of other “rogue” nations. We single out Israel because, shamefully, we are complicit in its crimes. </p>
<p>
<em>Mehdi Hasan is a contributing writer for the New Statesman and the political director of the Huffington Post UK, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/israel-gaza_b_5591954.html" target="_blank">where this column is crossposted</a></em></p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 16 Jul 2014 16:45:21 +0000Mehdi Hasan205966 at http://www.newstatesman.comThe hand-choppers of Isis are deluded: there is nothing Islamic about their caliphatehttp://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/07/hand-choppers-isis-are-deluded-there-nothing-islamic-about-their-caliphate
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Have we gone back in time? The era of Muslim caliphates came to a close in 1924, when the Ottomans were toppled in Turkey.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2014/07/451503904.jpg?itok=e2VacK8Z" width="510" height="348" alt="Iraqi women at the Khazair displacement camp for those caught-up in the fighting in Mosul. Photo: Getty" title="Iraqi women at the Khazair displacement camp for those caught-up in the fighting in Mosul. Photo: Getty" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Iraqi women at the Khazair displacement camp for those caught-up in the fighting in Mosul. Photo: Getty</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>
I have a new leader, apparently. As do the rest of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims. His name is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and he is the caliph and “leader for Muslims everywhere”. Or so say the blood-drenched fanatics of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (Isis). On 29 June, an Isis spokesman declared that the group had set up a caliphate in the areas under its control, from Diyala in eastern Iraq to Aleppo in northern Syria.</p>
<p>
Have we gone back in time? The era of Muslim caliphates came to a close in 1924, when the Ottomans were toppled in Turkey. Over the past nine decades, several Muslim leaders have tried to set themselves up as caliph-type figures (think of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran or the Taliban’s Mullah Omar in Afghanistan). Yet, crucially, none of them has tried to claim political authority over Muslims outside the borders of his respective state. Al-Baghdadi wants Muslims across the world to fall at his feet.</p>
<p>
The Isis declaration has come as a bit of a shock. In recent years, most Islamist groups (think al-Nahda in Tunisia or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt) have tried to take power through the ballot box, with only fringe groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir agitating for a medieval-style caliphate. (I remember arguing, as a teenager, with members of Hizb ut-Tahrir. “Brother, we need to reject western democracy and have a caliph,” they would say to me. “And how will we decide who the caliph is?” I would ask, feigning both innocence and interest. “Well . . . um . . . <span style="font-size: 11pt;">He’ll be elected,” they would invariably reply, shifting in their seats.)</span></p>
<p>
There are four points worth considering in any discussion of Isis or its “caliphate”. First, there is nothing Islamic about a state. I have argued before on these pages that: “There is not a shred of theological, historical or empirical evidence to support the existence of such an entity.” Yes, we Muslims have a romanticised view of Medina, under the rule of the Prophet Muhammad between 622 and 632AD, but it had none of the trappings of a modern state – no fixed borders, no standing army, no civil servants – and was led by a divinely appointed prophet of God. Unless the shadowy al-Baghdadi plans to declare his prophethood, too, the Medina example is irrelevant.</p>
<p>
Incidentally, the caliphate (from the Arabic <em>khilafah</em>, or “succession”) that came after Muhammad was plagued by intrigue, division and bloodshed. Three of the first four “rightly guided caliphs” were assassinated. By the 10th and 11th centuries, there were three different caliphates – Umayyad, Abbasid and Fatimid – which were constantly at war with one another. Not quite the golden age of the Islamist imagination.</p>
<p>
Second, the Islamic faith doesn’t require an Islamic state. I have never needed to live in such a caliphate in order to pray, fast or give alms. And, as the great Muslim jurist of the 14th century Imam Shatibi argued, sharia law can be boiled down to the preservation of five things: religion, life, reason, progeny and property. I’d argue that the UK, despite rising Islamophobia, does preserve these five things and therefore allows us, as Muslims, to live “Islamic” lives. By contrast, the authors of a recent study at George Washington University found: “Many countries that profess Islam and are called Islamic are unjust, corrupt and under­developed and are in fact not ‘Islamic’ by any stretch of the imagination.”</p>
<p>
Third, most Muslims don’t want an Isis-style state. In their book <em>Who Speaks for Islam?</em> – based on 50,000 interviews with Muslims in more than 35 countries – John L Esposito and Dalia Mogahed record how: “Majorities in many countries remarked that they do not want religious leaders to hold direct legislative or political power.”</p>
<p>
British Muslims aren’t keen, either. As many as 500 British Muslims are believed to have gone to fight for Isis, which is 500 too many but less than 0.02 per cent of the UK’s 2.7 million Muslims. A recent YouGov poll found that Muslims as a group are more patriotic Britons than Scots.</p>
<p>
Fourth, time and again, politicised Islam has proved to be a failure. Violent Islamists have discovered, after the shedding of much blood, that you cannot Islamise a society by force – whether in Afghanistan, Gaza, Egypt or Iran. Rhetoric is easy; running public services and state institutions much harder. The hand-choppers and throat-slitters of Isis, Boko Haram, al-Shabab and the rest have no political programme, no blueprint for government. Theirs is a hate-filled ideo­logy, built on a cult of victimhood and sustained by horrific violence.</p>
<p>
In his book <em>The Rise and Fall of al-Qaeda</em>, the Lebanese-American academic Fawaz A Gerges recalls interviewing Kamal al-Said Habib, a former member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Gerges asked whether the group had been “truly prepared to establish a viable Islamic government”. “Thank God, we did not win, because we would have constructed a state along the same authoritarian lines as the ones existing in the Muslim world,” Habib replied. “We had no vision or an intellectual framework of what a state is or how it functions and how it should be administered . . . While I cannot predict that our state would have been totalitarian, we had little awareness of the challenges that needed to be overcome.”</p>
<p>
Let me make a prediction. The so-called caliphate in Iraq and Syria will be totalitarian, won’t be Islamic and, in the words of the former US state department spokesman Philip Crowley, “has as much chance of survival as an ice cream cone in the desert”. By declaring statehood, Isis may have sown the seeds of its own destruction. </p>
<p>
<em>Mehdi Hasan is a contributing writer for the New Statesman and the political director of the Huffington Post UK, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/isis-caliphate_b_5558118.html">where this column is crossposted</a></em></p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 04 Jul 2014 15:32:40 +0000Mehdi Hasan204496 at http://www.newstatesman.comBlair’s supporters should stage a humanitarian intervention – and make him shut up about Iraqhttp://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/06/blair-s-supporters-should-stage-humanitarian-intervention-and-make-him-shut-about
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How many Sure Start centres cancel out the depleted uranium used in Fallujah? Why does record investment in the NHS absolve the torture and abuse in Abu Ghraib?</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2014/06/146313453.jpg?itok=ZJp_dOyr" width="510" height="348" alt="Mad or bad? Ex-PM Tony Blair in Hong Kong, 2012. Photo: Getty" title="Mad or bad? Ex-PM Tony Blair in Hong Kong, 2012. Photo: Getty" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Mad or bad? Ex-PM Tony Blair in Hong Kong, 2012. Photo: Getty</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>
<em><img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/images/2014%2B24small(1).jpg" style="width: 125px; height: 164px; margin: 1px 10px; float: left;" />You are invited to read this free preview of the upcoming New Statesman, out on 19 June. To purchase the full magazine - with our signature mix of opinion, longreads and arts coverage, plus columns by Laurie Penny on gender, Will Self on pulled pork, and a special in-depth piece on Iraq by John Bew and Shiraz Maher - please <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/subscribe" target="_blank">visit our subscription page</a>. </em></p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
Those lucky Americans. On 20 January 2009, George W Bush boarded a helicopter and flew out of Washington, DC, never to be heard from again. Well, apart from that unreadable memoir in 2010. And, er, those rather odd self-portraits.</p>
<p>
For Britons, however, Tony Blair never really went away. Month after month, year after year, he pops up on television, or appears in the newspapers, to promote an alliance with Putin’s Russia, or to defend Egypt’s military junta, or to push for military action against Iran/Syria/Iraq/fill-in-the-gap. He is the peace envoy who always wants war, the faith foundation boss who doesn’t understand the Islamic faith. Yet Blair, invader of Iraq, occupier of Afghanistan, defender of Israel’s 2006 blitz on Lebanon, is regularly and inexplicably invited by the British press to comment on all matters Middle Eastern. Why not ask Bernie Madoff to comment on financial regulation?</p>
<p>
In an era of dreary politicians, the silver-tongued Blair continues to beguile us. He is the Cristiano Ronaldo of politics: slick, skilful, <em>über</em>-confident and astonishingly arrogant. He may have converted to Catholicism but our former PM isn’t interested in confession. Blair doesn’t do remorse. As for an apology – you’re kidding, right?</p>
<p>
Seven years after quitting Downing Street, “the Master” still retains an army of apologists, in the commentariat and inside the Labour Party. Rather than stage a humanitarian intervention of their own and persuade their hero to keep shtum, his supporters constantly rally around him, always ready to defend the indefensible.</p>
<p>
When I interviewed the former culture secretary Tessa Jowell in February, for example, she called Blair’s backing of Egypt’s brutal generals “brave” and “counter-intuitive”. Meanwhile, in a recent BBC interview, the former home secretary Charles Clarke said that poor ol’ Tony was “in quite a tragic position” because he couldn’t return to British politics.</p>
<p>
Even senior Labour figures who opposed the Iraq war, such as the shadow justice secretary, Sadiq Khan, can’t bring themselves to disown their former leader. I asked Khan how Blair could conceivably be in the running for the job of EU president, given his bloodstained past. “He won three elections,” he replied, urging me to look at the ex-PM’s wider, domestic record. What’s the metric? How many Sure Start centres cancel out the depleted uranium used in Fallujah? Which increase in the minimum wage excuses the kids killed by cluster bombs in Hilla? Why does record investment in the NHS absolve the torture and abuse in Abu Ghraib?</p>
<p>
It cannot be said often enough: Blair’s misadventure in Mesopotamia was a moral, political and financial catastrophe, which led to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, millions of Iraqi refugees and billions of pounds squandered. Blair and Bush became recruiting sergeants for al-Qaeda: according to a 2007 study, the Iraq war “generated a stunning sevenfold increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks”.</p>
<p>
Our former PM now claims he “underestimated” the “depth and the complexity of the problem”. He can’t say he wasn’t warned. His holiday pal Hosni Mubarak of Egypt predicted that the invasion of Iraq would produce “100 Bin Ladens”, while his own joint intelligence committee told him the threat from al-Qaeda “would be heightened by military action against Iraq”.</p>
<p>
In November 2002, four months before the invasion, three experts on Iraq were invited to brief the then PM in Downing Street. One of the three, George Joffe of Cambridge University, tells me how he outlined Iraq’s sectarian and tribal divisions and warned of the danger of postwar insurgency and civil conflict. Blair’s only response: “But the man’s evil, isn’t he?” Joffe was “staggered” to discover the prime minister was “completely uninterested in the complexities” of Iraqi society and displayed a “shallow mind”. In Blair’s head, says the Cambridge academic, the whole Iraq issue was “personalised” in the form of Saddam Hussein and: “It was clear that the decision had already been made . . . to invade.”</p>
<p>
What’s going on inside Blair’s head today? Opinion is divided. Our former prime minister has “finally gone mad”, claimed Boris Johnson in the <em>Telegraph</em> on 16 June, and “needs professional psychiatric help”. The neuropsychologist Paul Broks has called Blair a “plausible psychopath . . . charming, intelligent, emotionally manipulative”.</p>
<p>
Then there is the “Bliar” brigade, which sees the ex-PM as a knowing and serial untruth-teller. “We were misled,” the former Labour cabinet minister Clare Short told the Iraq inquiry in February 2010. “On the one thing that he’s taken a stand . . . which was taking us to war, he didn’t even tell the truth about that,” the then Tory leader, Michael Howard, argued in April 2005.</p>
<p>
Is he mad or bad? Deluded or dishonest? It no longer matters. Blair’s reputation lies in tatters. More than half of Brits believe their former prime minister was wrong to invade Iraq; one in five tell YouGov they think he should be tried as a war criminal. Blair can try to pretend he lives a normal life but when he goes to a book signing, people pelt him with eggs; when he goes out for dinner with his family, people try to arrest him. He doesn’t want our forgiveness – and nor will we give it to him.</p>
<p>
“We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that ‘we’ have caused this,” wrote Blair on his website on 14 June, responding to the recent rise of the al-Qaeda offshoot Isis inside Iraq. “We haven’t.” For once, he’s right. “We” didn’t cause it. He did. </p>
<p>
<em style="line-height: 22px;">Mehdi Hasan is a contributing writer for the New Statesman and the political director of the Huffington Post UK, <a href="http://huff.to/1lztKR9" target="_blank">where this article is crossposted</a></em></p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 18 Jun 2014 16:02:49 +0000Mehdi Hasan203151 at http://www.newstatesman.comWhy Elizabeth Warren should take on Hillary Clinton and run for the US presidencyhttp://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/06/why-elizabeth-warren-should-take-hillary-clinton-and-run-us-presidency
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Simply by running, Warren will drag the centrist Clinton to the left and put the causes she cares about – financial reform, fairer taxes, income inequality – at the centre of the 2016 presidential election.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2014/06/187783455.jpg?itok=YbOcHAYP" width="510" height="348" alt="Senator Elizabeth Warren in late 2013. Photo: Getty" title="Senator Elizabeth Warren in late 2013. Photo: Getty" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Elizabeth Warren says she is “not running” for president, but hasn’t ruled it out. Photo: Getty</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>
Can you imagine Ed Miliband giving the following speech?</p>
<blockquote><p>
I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.’ No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own – nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything . . . Now, look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless – keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
If only, eh? The centre left in the UK tends to recoil from using such stridently populist language. Miliband, in particular, is sensitive to the tabloid charge of being “Red Ed”. But the centre left in the US? It’s got Elizabeth Warren: senator, former law professor and darling of the Democratic Party base.</p>
<p>
It was Warren who delivered that rousing address in Andover, Massachusetts, in August 2011, a month before announcing her candidacy for the US Senate. (Spoiler alert: she won.) Her audience applauded wildly; the video of her speech went viral, amassing more than a million views online.</p>
<p>
Here, it seemed for the first time, was an unashamedly left-wing US politician who could tell stories and capture the public mood; who could tailor a message for both middle-class and working-class voters; who was confident and unapologetic, rather than defensive and cautious.</p>
<p>
In an age of Occupy Wall Street and Thomas Piketty, of growing public concern over income inequality and rising anger towards the big banks (including among supporters of the Republican Party), Warren has become a progressive superstar. Her memoir, <em>A Fighting Chance</em>, has been on the <em>New York Times</em> bestseller list since it was published in April. In the book, she recalls a dinner she was invited to in April 2009 with President Obama’s then chief economic adviser, Larry Summers. “Late in the evening, Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice,” she writes. “I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access . . . [but they] also understand one unbreakable rule: they don’t criticise other insiders. I had been warned.”</p>
<p>
The warning didn’t work. Four years later, Warren led the Senate Democrats’ campaign to prevent Summers from being nominated to run the US Federal Reserve. Hers is a no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners approach. In February 2013, at her first appearance on the Senate banking committee, Warren skewered a gaggle of top regulators by asking when they had last prosecuted a major bank. Again, the video of her remarks went viral. So, too, did her July 2013 clash with a CNBC cable news host over whether or not to break up the big banks – it was viewed online more than a million times.</p>
<p>
Will Warren dare to run against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for the presidency? She repeatedly tells reporters that she is “not running” for president, but hasn’t ruled it out. She is 64. If Clinton runs, wins and serves two terms, there won’t be a White House vacancy until 2024, when the Massachusetts senator will be 75.</p>
<p>
It’s 2016 or never. Can she win? Junior senators with a single term on Capitol Hill, a lack of foreign-policy experience and an opponent called Clinton can’t win, right? I mean, er, just ask Obama.</p>
<p>
Like Hillary Clinton, Warren is a feisty female with a national profile and a knack for fundraising: she secured $40m for her Senate race, more than half of it online. Unlike Clinton, who gave two paid speeches to Goldman Sachs in 2013 alone, Warren does not have to rely on the big banks for financial support: eight out of every ten contributions to her Senate campaign were less than $50.</p>
<p>
Then again, whether she wins or not isn’t the issue. Simply by running, she will drag the centrist Clinton to the left and put the causes she cares about – financial reform, fairer taxes, income inequality – at the centre of the 2016 presidential election. A Warren candidacy would not just be “Hillary’s nightmare” – to quote the headline of the <em>New Republic</em>’s cover story on Warren last November – it would be Wall Street’s.</p>
<p>
Ed Miliband tells friends he’s an admirer of Warren but he hasn’t yet been able to emulate her style, passion or rhetoric. (The only videos of Miliband that go viral involve him either robotically repeating himself or trying to eat a bacon sandwich.)</p>
<p>
There is still time. On paper, Warren, lest we forget, is as wonkish as Miliband, if not more so. The Labour leader may sound professorial; Warren was a professor. There is no reason why the Labour leader, if he eschews the triangulating tendencies of some of his aides, stops giving dense speeches and takes a much stronger stance against Big Finance, can’t rediscover his own inner populist. He has done so before: on those brief occasions when he stood up to Rupert Murdoch or when he challenged the “big six” energy companies.</p>
<p>
Forget the hapless Hollande or the opportunistic Obama: Elizabeth Warren’s way should be Ed Miliband’s way. You never know – he may even end up paying her a visit at the White House.</p>
<p>
<em>Mehdi Hasan is a contributing writer for the New Statesman and the political director of the Huffington Post UK, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/elizabeth-warren-hillary-clinton_b_5498401.html?1402913168&amp;ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000067" target="_blank">where this column is crossposted</a></em></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 16 Jun 2014 10:13:31 +0000Mehdi Hasan202526 at http://www.newstatesman.com